Winter Prey

to us. Just so everything’s okay. And I think we ought to keep it between us.”
    “Sure. I’m not going to tell anybody else,” John said. “Not about that,” he said earnestly, eyes big.
    “Good,” Lucas said. He relaxed and smiled. “Go get your stuff, and let’s go out to your place.”
    “Did we do good?” Rusty asked lazily when John had gone.
    “Yeah, you did good,” Lucas said.
    The two deputies slapped hands and Lucas said, “You’re all done with Lisa’s friends?”
    “Yeah, all done,” Rusty said.
    “Great. Now do this other kid’s friends. The Harper kid. Look for connections between Lisa and Harper,” Lucas said. “And if this picture was passed around, find out who passed it.”

    Lucas used a pay phone in the teachers’ lounge to call the sheriff’s office. “You sound funny,” he said when Carr came on.
    “You’re being relayed. What’d you need?”
    “Are we scrambled?”
    “Not really.”
    “I’ll talk to you later. Something’s come up.”
    “I’m on my way to the LaCourts’.”
    “I’m heading that way, so I’ll see you there,” Lucas said. He hung up momentarily, then redialed the sheriff’s office, got Helen, the office manager, and asked her to start digging up the files on the Harper murder.
    John Mueller had gone to put his books away and get his coat and boots. As Lucas waited for him at the front door, a bell rang and kids flooded into the hallways. Another, nonstudent head bobbed above the others in the stream, caught his eye. The doctor. He took a step toward her. He’d been a while without a woman friend; thought he could get away from the need by making a hermit of himself, by working out. He was wrong, judging from the tension in his chest . . . unless he was having a heart attack. Weather was pulling on her cap as she came toward him, and oversized mittens with leather palms. She nodded, stopped and said, “Anything good?”
    “Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head. Not pretty, he thought, but very attractive. A little rough, like she might enjoy the occasional fistfight. Who is she dating? There must be someone. The guy is probably an asshole; probably has little tassels on his shoes and combs them straight in the morning, before he puts the mousse on his hair.
    “I was doing TB patches down there.” She nodded back down the hall, toward a set of open double doors. A gymnasium. “And one kid was scared to death that somebody was going to come kill him in the night.”
    Lucas shrugged. “That’s the way it goes.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was wrong.
    “Mr. Liberal,” she said, her voice flat.
    “Hey, nothing I can do about it except catch the asshole,” Lucas said, irritated. “Look, I didn’t really . . .” He was about to go on but she turned away.
    “Do that,” she said, and pushed through the door to the outside.
    Annoyed, Lucas leaned against the entryway bulletin board, watching her walk to her car. Had a nice walk, he decided. When he turned back to the school, looking for John, he saw a yellow-haired girl watching him.
    She stood in a classroom doorway, staring at him with a peculiar intensity, as though memorizing his face. She was tall, but slight, angular with just the first signs of an adolescent roundness. And she was pale as paper. The most curious thing was her hair, which was an opaque yellow, the color of a sunflower petal, and close-cropped. With her pointed chin, large tilted eyes and short hair, she had a waifish look, like she should be selling matches. She wore a homemade dress of thin print material, cotton, with short sleeves: summer wear. She held three books close to her chest. When he looked at her, she held his eyes for a moment, a gaze with a solid sexuality to it, speculative, but at the same time, hurt, then turned and walked away.
    John arrived in a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood and mittens. “Do you have a cop car?” he asked.
    “No. A four-by-four,” Lucas said.
    “How come?”
    “I’m new here.”

    John’s father was a mild, round-faced man in a yellow wool sweater and corduroys. “How come you didn’t tell me?” he asked his son. He sat on a high stool. On his bench, a foxskin was half-stretched over a wooden form. John shrugged, looked away.
    “Embarrassed,” Lucas said. “He did the right thing, today. We didn’t want you to think we were grilling him. We’d have called you, to get you in, but I was right there and he was . . .”
    “That’s